What were the big themes this year? Which stories on OSNews were the most popular? We dove into our database (well, Adam did), and compiled a list of 2010's ten most popular stories on OSNews. As a metric, we didn't look at silly things like hits or whatever, but at the only metric that matters on OSNews, the only metric which really indicates what our registered (and thus, loyal) readers loved to argue about this year: number of comments. Yes, that headline is intentionally confusing.

I won’t be the first to say that comments are not a good measure, since the article with the most comments ever is Linus’ troll "Use KDE".

The HTML5 debate has been most beneficial; it’s something that affects all operating systems, including alternative ones. Thanks to HTML5 content being available I can even watch YouTube on MorphOS. No such thing was possible with Flash (and never will be).

HTML5 will allow alternative operating systems to play on a level playing-field.

For popularity, wouldn't you actually want to measure the number of people who commented, as opposed to the number of comments? If only two people care about a certain topic, but care enough to leave 500 comments, I don't think that's more popular than 100 people who care about a topic, but leave only 2 comments each.

No, it's actually a horrible measure. Did you measure total comments, or total unique commenters? If it's just total comments, it's likely that only 4 or 5 people kept dialogging back and forth, driving the total up. Your metric doesn't tell you how popular it was, just that a few people really liked to argue about it.

Some metric of how many people read the article, or clicked on the link for the source article would probably mean more. And yes, I recognize that there are flaws and compromises with methods of measuring that.

What you measured would more likely be labeled as most controversial, not most popular.

The browser is only the "new OS" to people who don't understand what an OS is. Perhaps it's the new "software suite", but to say it's an OS is to be lulled by marketing nonsense. (Given how people these days are so GUI-centric, this misconception is understandable.)

The concerning thing about the "browser as OS" mentality is that it plays into the whole "cloud computing" sham. (If we called "cloud computing" for what it really is, "data storage outsourcing", it wouldn't sound nearly as sexy to the easily-swayed.)